Wednesday, June 19, 2013

More Creationist Stupidity

6:35 AM  Admin  

PZ Myers has discovered an article published in Christian News. The title of the article is: Groundbreaking Genetic Discoveries Challenge Ape to Human Evolutionary Theory. Here's the opening paragraph ...
Fresh findings in the field of genetics have directly challenged yet another key evolutionary hypothesis by showing that the differences between humans and apes cannot be easily accounted for under the theory of evolution.
The paper they are referring to is Farré et al. (2013) and it shows the exact opposite of what the creationists claim. The paper demonstrates reduced recombination rates in those parts of the human and chimp chromosomes where genomic rearrangements have occurred. That's exactly what has been observed for the past 75 years. (See my post on balancer chromosomes, which describes artificial Drosophila chromosomes that were constructed to supress recombination.)

Read PZ's post on the subject to see just how stupid the creationists can be: Do the creationist shuffle and twist!.

I really don't get it. Why does the creationist movement publish material that is blatantly wrong? Even though I mock them repeatedly, I don't really think that every one of them is stupid. Where are the smart ones who review articles like the one published in Christian News? Will we see a retraction or an apology now that their error has been exposed by PZ and by some of the people who commented on the Christian News website?

Farré, M., Micheletti, D., Ruiz-Herrera, A. (2012) Recombination Rates and Genomic Shuffling in Human and Chimpanzee--A New Twist in the Chromosomal Speciation Theory. Mol. Biol. Evol. 30:853-864.

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